Burlington

A Lake Champlain college town where John Dewey was born in 1859, he would spend his career arguing that education should grow out of lived experience rather than being poured into children from the outside.

Burlington sits on Lake Champlain and had a university, a working waterfront, and a population divided fairly sharply between old Vermont families and newly arrived Irish and French Canadian labourers. Dewey grew up there and noticed the division. He went on to argue for schools organized around doing rather than reciting, and for democracy understood less as a system of voting than as a way of living with people you are obliged to keep talking to.